


Pal, Buddy, Bucky

by amclove



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: M/M, One-Shot, based off what steve said to wanda in civil war, so wHAT IF, we know he had been friends with bucky way before age 16, what did that mean??
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-21
Updated: 2018-05-21
Packaged: 2019-05-09 23:19:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14725520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amclove/pseuds/amclove
Summary: "Rumlow said ‘Bucky’ and, all of a sudden, I was a 16-year-old kid again in Brooklyn."





	Pal, Buddy, Bucky

**Author's Note:**

> Your pal, your buddy, your Bucky…

     It wasn’t like Steve didn’t like girls. For one, girls’ hair always appeared softer than the clouds in the sky, they usually somehow smelled like a flower garden, and their rosy cheeks looked for all the world like ripe apples. Franky, he wouldn’t be a human man if that sort of stuff didn’t affect him.

     It’s just the problem with all of it was that, for a long while now, he’d seen his closest friend in much the same way, as something perfect and unattainable. That smile that came slow as it turned up his lips, like it surprised Bucky; or how wonderfully mussed his shorn hair was when just waking, the squint of sleep-blurred eyes focused always on Steve.

     He could name the day, in fact, on which he looked over at James Buchanan Barnes and really noticed that whatever it was he was feeling wasn’t along the same lines as what other boys felt for their good friends. At least, not the boys that Steve was already so different from in general personality, size, demeanor, interests.

     On this particular night, he and Bucky had been 16 and wandering along the sidewalk past eleven. As usual, they were acting like goofs, and shoving each other this way and that just like they always did. It came that Bucky nudged Steve a little too hard, to the point where he nearly sent the other boy careening off the curb, but Bucky’d yanked at Steve’s flailing arm and hauled him right into his chest.

     He held Steve steady and the moment was over before it began but Steve still felt it like a weight had been dropped onto his lungs. The feeling of being pressed to Bucky’s chest, breathing hard and staring up at him like he was a God-send (as usual); Bucky, concern written in his eyes, checking Steve’s face over to be sure he was okay. And that was it. Suddenly, Steve became aware of something between himself and Bucky that he so desperately didn’t want to be aware of, because it was inevitably one-sided and would end with Steve alone.

     His pal, his buddy, his Bucky. But Bucky wasn’t his. He was just a dumbass, asthmatic kid from Brooklyn that didn’t know what he wanted. A sweet-smelling dame with red lips, or a boy with a wry grin and broad shoulders. He wished he could have both, because he knew that a world without Bucky was a world that Steve didn’t want to live in.

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I don’t own the Avengers or anything relating to the publications.


End file.
